Daughters - Exodus 21:7-11

21:7-11 - The next part deals with a more complicated form of slavery… selling your daughter. This is a tough subject for me as a woman and as a woman who’s father would have sold her to the highest bidder the first chance he got. But it’s important to keep some context here, in that anciently in almost every society in the whole world, women were property and often not even valuable property, subject to any mistreatment and abuse that any man felt like he wanted to inflict on her without repercussions. So on the one hand, yeah my dad was a monster and I’m still suffering with the consequences of that, but on the other hand, didn’t I just have the same experience that 99.9% of women who have ever lived? It’s actually one thing that has comforted me, I hate that any one has ever suffered, but the fact that my suffering was just kind of par for the course for so many people, it actually makes me feel a little bit better.

I just want to mention a few things off topic here, because I feel like I’ve been bringing up trauma and family issues and childhood stuff a lot and honestly I hate it. I’m in my 40’s and I’m at a point in my life where my kids are grown and gone, I’m not in completely survival mode for the first time in my life, I’m perimenopausal, so there’s a lot of hormonal stuff going on. And with having covid 3 times that has messed up my taste and smell significantly and probably permanently, a lot of aspects have converged on this moment in time for me to have an opportunity to heal from a lifetime of trauma. That’s why I bring it up so much now where I don’t feel like I brought it up that much before, this is the first time in my life that I’ve been in a place where I can deal with it. It’s long and painful and I feel really weird, but I am trying and this is my one outlet to try and wok through it in a spiritual way. So, sorry if it’s annoying, I feel like it is, but that’s why there has been a shift in the narrative recently.

Anyway, the law stated that a maidservant that is sold “shall not go out as the menservants do.” The IM and TB both say that this means that she isn’t to be treated like a slave, and both note that this is only to be the case with the understanding that she will eventually be married to the man to whom she was sold. This might be a roundabout way to get to like a reverse dowry, where the man who wants to marry her pays money and then she has to serve his household for a while, then he will marry her, I think that I’ve heard that this was a common arrangement in some societies. TB also notes that the marriage might not be that of the first, main, or even legal wife, it might end up that this newly bought girl will be a concubine. Anciently concubine meant that the woman was “almost” a wife in her rights and status but that she had not “Chethubah” or a marriage contract and had no rights to property at the time of her husband’s death. It would also limit the rights of inheritance for her children upon the death of their father. p/>

A legal wife would not be sold, but a concubine could be, but in the law of Moses, the concubine that was bought within the confines of this “handmaiden” arrangement with her father, could not be sold outside of the tribes of Israel. So even if a foreigner came and offered a ton of money for this concubine, she legally could not be sold to him, she had to stay within the tribes of Israel, and this because only the tribes of Israel adhered to the law of Moses, meaning that only in Israel would she be able to maintain these rights. Additionally, if she is the first wife, if the husband takes another wife, the first wife’s rights do not decrease, “her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage.” Duty of marriage here means what it sounds like he has to keep having sex with her, I imagine that is so that she can have children. This guy can’t just find a women, prettier wife and suddenly neglect his first wife. And if he does any of these things, “then shall she go out free without money.” So all this is happening under the context of her still being legally bound to him as a “slave” or “servant.” The IM and TB both use different words for the same concept, the law of Moses had revolutionary guarantees for women giving them legal rights that were found nowhere else in the ancient world, and in limited places even in the modern world. The IM says, “If the prospective husband was no pleased with the new bride, the law guaranteed her rights. This legal guarantee was in sharp contrast to the practice of most other people whose women were viewed as property to be bargained away at the whim of men.” TB notes, “While it may not seem so to us in this cultural setting, what is really happening here is that Yehoveh is making clear that in the paternalistic society of Israel, typical of the ancient world, women rights, they have value, to God, and they are to be treated fairly and with consideration among His set-apart people.”

The concept of “Jesus Christ as champion for women” was first introduced to me by that exactly sentence in Jesus the Christ 15 years ago and I’ve been stewing on it ever since. Obviously, I have issues with authority and patriarchy and men and all that, but over the years, I’ve seen time and time again where God worked within the limited framework of people’s understanding and society to make space for women’s safety and comfort. It’s really helped me heal a lot actually, as I see that even though women have been treated so horrifically throughout human history, there was no other way for God’s purposes to be accomplished without it. BUT… He has done everything he can, while maintaining the plan, to protect women.

I spent the vast majority of my life believing that God was just like every other man in my life, “my way or the highway,” completely indifferent to my suffering, could not care less about what happened to me regardless of how faithful I was to him. One of the most powerful experiences that I had was then I realized that he hated what happened to me just as much as I did. I realized that he wasn’t annoyed at me when I cried, but that He cried too, with me. That was a shift in my perspective of God and who He actually is and who I am to him. There have been several times like that, just little insights behind the curtain, that have helped me heal. I’m still working on it, slowly, but I’ll get there.